This week, Whole Foods put three asparagus stalks in some water, called it “asparagus water” and charged $6 for it.

The store, which specialises in organic food and poultry “free of growth hormones and antibiotics” at prices that have led it to be dubbed “Whole Paycheck” later claimed the asparagus water was a mistake and removed it from shelves. But not before Whole Foods was publicly ridiculed over the product.

Part of the reason for the outcry is that even though asparagus water turned out to be short-lived, you can easily imagine it being a permanent Whole Foods staple. A nonsense product, supposedly healthy or organic or artisanal, served at an outrageous price. This is peak Whole Foods.

I went to a Whole Foods for the first time on Wednesday morning in New York. They didn’t have any asparagus water (it was served only in one Los Angeles store, and only briefly). But they had items of a similar ilk.

There was a kale, apple, ginger, romaine, spinach, cucumber, celery, parsley and lemon cold pressed juice. A pint of which cost $9.99. There was also some Omega 3 mayonnaise with “expeller pressed” flax seed oil. $8.99.

Whole Foods is well known for selling fancyproducts. Ornamental Kale. Kaleamole. “Veganic sprouted” things. Olive oil that’s so virginal it might as well come in a chastity belt.

But if you look past the chia seeds and hemp seeds and sacred seeds, you find that mostly, Whole Foods sells your bog-standard supermarket stuff. The chain offers a lot of food products you could just easily find at Walmart. It just sells them alongside versions that are needlessly, wastefully, hedonistically expensive.

Take their eggs, for example. There are normal eggs at roughly normal prices (more expensive, obviously, but check out the fancy basket you get to wheel around). But Whole Foods will also present you with the chance to buy a dozen eggs for $7.99 – more than three times the New York average. They come from “Vital Farms”. They are “pasture raised”, organic and “ethical”. They are also eggs.

If you want, you can buy a teeny, tiny pot of “Beth’s farm kitchen” raspberry jam for for $9.99. You can buy Saratoga “Blizzard” peanut butter for $7.49, although only because it’s on sale. It normally costs $8.49. Be sure to snap up a “Hu kitchen” chocolate bar for $7.99. It’s paleo and vegan and, according to the packaging, “simple”.

Choose from more than 40 different types of tea. Hey, there’s even one with the in-no-way-patronising title “Builder’s brew” that I can guarantee has never been drunk by an actual builder. Two ounces of tea is $7.49. That $7.49 will get you 15 to 18 cups of tea. That’s 50 cents to make a cup of tea in your own home. What is this, the Weimar Republic?

So who is buying these things? I’ll tell you. Idiots. Idiots with too much money. That’s the whole idea. Whole Foods has discovered that people will pay pretty much anything for the most basic items, as long as the mushrooms are local or the hummus is organic or the jam comes with a simplistic “homely” logo that makes it look like it was made in an old woman’s kitchen.

If Whole Foods had kept the asparagus water on the shelves, people would have bought it. They would have bought it because it is the same as normal asparagus, but more expensive. Because people are idiots. And because Whole Foods is clever.